I don't watch TV news - neither the six o'clock (do they still have that?) nor the twenty-four-hour varieties. I do occasionally catch a headline on one of the TVs at the gym, where FauxNews and CNN are right next to each other in my peripheral vision. Apparently two years ago there was a big kerfuffle about an Air Force veteran who was forcibly removed from a flag-folding ceremony, which was part of the retirement celebration for a friend, when he used a religiously-tinged and unapproved script. Apparently the guy had a history of inflammatory incidents and had been told he couldn't speak at the event, however the guest of honor insisted he go on. When asked to leave, the guy refused and continued to shout his words as he was forcibly removed from the proceedings. Basically everyone looked bad all around, the Air Force changed their policy and the guy's now suing (conveniently, I believe, right before the statute of limitations runs out).
This is a talking-head special if there ever was one. How do I know? Well, the only place you can get any coverage of this event or the lawsuit is on fringe (both right and left) and military-specific websites. I'm linking to the AirForceTimes which, amazingly, seems the least partisan. As you might expect, this has become a virtual hand-grenade where people are lobbing different notions of religious freedom/persecution at each other without really saying anything.
I'm all for peaceful protest, even vociferous and disruptive protest, should the situation call for it. Clearly the guy retiring wanted to make a statement by asking his friend to use a non-standard script. They were warned and continued and they should be free to do so. The Air Force is also free to remove the guy from the ceremony, as they did, and he's free to keep shouting as he's removed, which is what happened. I wouldn't say there was physical resistance, but everybody was sticking to their line pretty firmly.
What I don't get, though, is this lawsuit. The guy and his lawyer are all over the television demanding I'm not sure what - money, I guess - but the Air Force already changed the policy as a result of this incident. It seems like, if the guy was really standing up for his religious rights, that the battle was won.
That troubles me a bit, as a Christian, because it's downright offensive to the gospel to associate it with any nation or military, but that ship has sailed long ago, I'm afraid. Not only has Americanism become our default religion; it's getting labeled as Christianity. The use of power and force are antithetical to the message of Jesus Christ and we have another exhibit of that in this situation.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to get a court to admit the Air Force violated this man's rights. It's a move for dominance. Regardless of whether or not I agree with his actions (and I don't, although there are plenty of other times I do, and it still rubs me the wrong way), Christians can't demand "rights." We gave up the right to our "rights" when we accepted the way of the cross. In the way Jesus refused to argue for himself during his many trials, we're called to live out our understanding of right action and accept whatever response we receive.
It feels like this guy should be overjoyed that his actions produced change in the direction he wanted. To me, that's the ultimate victory. I don't understand how one could make a Christian argument to then essentially humiliate your opponent. Paul, on several occasions, used his Roman citizenship to call officials to follow their own laws; he didn't then return to rub it in their faces or embarrass them to their superiors. In the end, he took whatever judgment the law required and did so willingly, following the example of his savior.
This is why Christians can't hold a cross in one hand and a flag in the other; the two are diametrically opposed, not necessarily in the game of ideas, but in lifestyle and action. Too much of "religious" dialogue these days is an attempt to browbeat people into assenting to ideas we call Christian. It's about winning the intellectual assent of others, or at least their grudging tolerance. The gospel, though, is not really about theology, but about the lifestyle inspired by our understanding of God. If we do not act in accordance with our beliefs, we don't believe at all.
The national religion of the US tends to work backwards - seeking the best course of action (best defined as most beneficial to me and mine) and then inventing a theology to support it. This is the path of least resistance and people stumble into bad theology this way all the time (its not just the purview of nationalism or convenience). In the end, the gospel is absurd from the perspective of practicality. It's predicated on truth and reality not being readily apparent. The idea that weakness is strength and love leads to truth just doesn't fit with how we've constructed our world to work.
If you're pushing your own agenda through force or persuasion, you're not representing the gospel. The way you present your ideas is far more important than those ideas themselves. For Christians, winning society's games necessarily means losing your faith. It's great to stand up, with your body, and live your beliefs in the public square - I applaud those who do, even if I disagree with them; it's quite another to expect the public square to celebrate you. That's a game you can't win and shouldn't play.
As we develop, the way we understand and interact with the universe changes. The next step in religious evolution is our understanding the difference between a religion and the truth is claims to mediate. When I say "truth" I'm merely referring to our baseline definition of the universe and how it functions. This might take the form of a traditional religion; it might be science or astrology or attachment to family or any other thing we use to give meaning to the world around us. Religion is the practice of living out those truth claims.
We are truly evolving a new understanding whereby we dissociate the medium of religion from the message it's designed to carry. This comes with some assumption that there is a "truth" out there, some meaning or ground of being that we stand some chance of grasping. All but the most nihilistic of us hold to the reality of this idea. The self-analysis, though, is truly a profound development for religion, because it means forming a religion that hold religion at distance in hopes of embracing a broader, perhaps more mysterious truth.
This is not something we can logic out or rationally capture. It defies the traditional means of modern understanding. That's dangerous for the status quo. This is why you see the rise of fundamentalism parallel almost completely with the rise of post-modern thought. We think of fundamentalism as age-old because it's focus is the fundamental, which we associate with beginning. Ultimately, though, fundamentalism is a recent phenomenon, built specifically (although perhaps reflexively rather than intentionally) to head off this evolution of thinking by inextricably combining medium and message. As people attempt to differentiate religion from its underlying truth, fundamentalism seeks to make those two things inseparable.
It is, at it's core, a power play. Those who control the religion want to continue to control the truth.
As our thought moves beyond this link, I'm afraid the emphasis on fundamentalism will, instead of connecting medium and message, force us to discard one or the other altogether. My big fear is that we'll lose the really vital and important contributions of religious history. While I am in favor of dissecting the difference between medium and message, we must not throw either one away in pursuit of truth. The two must be held together, but held with the proper perspective and tension.
Christianity needs its historic tradition, but it also needs to view that historic tradition with a critical eye to how our knowledge and understanding have changed over time. As the world globalizes, we have to be willing to hold loosely (although not entirely let go of) the reality that Christian tradition is largely a narrow, western-influenced stream of development. It's not that pre-creedal (or a-creedal) developments must be uniformally embraced, but we have to have some recognition that the historic development of various traditions are not necessarily equivalent to the truth of Jesus Christ, but are culturally conditioned (generally in good faith) means of living into that truth.
At the same time, we must guard against the opposite reaction, which ends with each person developing their own medium, their own religion, and by which we lose any real relational connection to each other. We become automatons, living out the truth as we see it and working tirelessly not to step on anyone's toes. We must walk the tightrope between "I'm okay; you're okay" and "I alone understand truth."
I'd argue, in fact, that whatever the real "truth" might happen to be, it cannot be understood without the necessary connection of medium and message. You might say the message is not so much about what one believe, but how one believes. In some roundabout way, instead of the fundamentalist notion of "the medium is the message," we might say the opposite is true - the message is the medium.
Now the distinction there might seem no more than semantic, but the order, in this case, is important. When the medium is the message, the medium is all important. This is traditional fundamentalism: there is one right way to embody truth. It leads to a zero-sum game in which there is only one winner (or, more properly, no winners, but a lot of losers). When the message is the medium, we're constantly forced to revise and amend the way we embody truth to account for the changes in our experience of truth. We must have the religion, the medium, and we must hold each other accountable for a good faith effort to live it out (even if we don't always agree on specifics), but what we cannot do is believe we've arrived. There is no end to that journey - because the message, the truth, is not a destination, but the journey itself.
So this where the danger comes in to play. Fundamentalism has a tendency to drive people away from the notion that medium and message, religion and truth, could possibly be connected. This is what you see in someone like the late Christopher Hitchens, who held that religion is the exact opposite of truth and the real stumbling block to finding it. He took this position, with sound reasoning, because of his experience with fundamentalism, especially how fundamentalism is, so often, the dominant way of understanding life and faith. Atheists are some of the most religious people on Earth.
Traditional atheists have often made the claim that nothing is unique to religion that can't be found without it. When viewed in this "medium is the message" light, that's entirely true. The problem is, though, that their response is to essentially create a new religion built on the same foundation; the medium is still the message, it's just missing God. It becomes its own fundamentalism.
There's a vicious cycle that's played out over time and repeated throughout history.
We've got to be careful to combat any kind of fundamentalism, whether it be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Scientific, or Atheist with a profound embodiment of the how. The medium is not the message; the message is the medium. Our ideas are far less influential than the ways we live them out. People will be far more shaped and formed by grace and humility than knowledge and intellect. They will be more moved by openness and honesty than power and persuasion. This is just the way things work.
As we move forward in the world. As we attempt to participate in our communities and congregations, I hope we can step out of this cycle altogether and engage people not with ideas, but with imagination - embodying and exemplifying a way of belief instead of a what.
